![]() I was there near the beginning when new versions of the "iWork Apps" were created for the cloud - some of the re-design that had to be done for the web-based versions of the apps moved back to the desktop version in the name of consistent UI. It was absolutely a full-time team then - I have no reason to believe that has changed.Īs the stable of apps owned by the team is (was, at least) fairly large (Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iBooks, iBooks Author) it was of course possible that some apps could get more love for a release cycle than others. I worked on this team for a bit, years ago. In the "Productivity" category of the App Store, you'll find all the cloud companies with DaaS offerings all heavily advertising and competing over business customers with exactly that user-story.īut if an org is optimizing for IT OpEx by issuing employees DaaS thin-client hardware, then it'd be cheaper still to just issue them Chromebooks. AWS WorkSpaces, Azure Virtual Desktop, whatever Citrix has been offering for decades now, etc.Īnd you can certainly use all of those DaaS apps, on an iPad, with a Bluetooth keyboard. That app exists: it's called a Desktop-as-a-Service, e.g. ![]() > Apple should have an application on iDevices that provides office word processing, office mail, office spreadsheet, office telephony, all the office apps in one app that looks like a desktop, such that with BT keyboard and smallish 1080p monitor (actually I'd prefer 1024x768) would replace all the non-power users', non-developer desktops (secretaries, customer support, VPs, etc.), save offices a bundle of money on hardware, and beat Microsoft at it's own game without killing Microsoft's Office environment, yet. It's just LDAP.īut Apple still walks around Microsoft like they'e stepping on egg shells, and for the life of me I can't figure why. It could still be a lot better and a lot simpler. Active Directory is probably the best thing Microsoft ever did, got it the most right of all endeavors. Then when Apple Office becomes ubiquitous because it's so much cheaper and so much better than Microsoft, replace Microsoft's backend Exchange servers with Apple appliance hardware that doesn't need any administration other than adding and deleting users/groups, etc., and a plugin replacement for Office365 (am I the only one that thinks this is a clunky monstrosity?) back at Apple data centers, and not quite cut out all Microsoft with Apple alternatives that just work better, but allow any Poindexters to continue to run Windows and MS Office Suite and still integrate seamlessly. Apple should have an application on iDevices that provides office word processing, office mail, office spreadsheet, office telephony, all the office apps in one app that looks like a desktop, such that with BT keyboard and smallish 1080p monitor (actually I'd prefer 1024x768) would replace all the non-power users', non-developer desktops (secretaries, customer support, VPs, etc.), save offices a bundle of money on hardware, and beat Microsoft at it's own game without killing Microsoft's Office environment, yet. Idky Apple doesn't just take over the office, interface their software and devices with Exchange and Office365 and Active-Directory more cleanly and more stably than Microsoft can. Maybe with those out of the way, they will have time to focus on the core experience again, motivated by new competition in the space. ![]() My hope is that the team has simply been so swamped with cloud features and iOS/iPadOS parity over the last few years that they haven't been able to prioritize big changes. Allowing users to apply styles between existing docs (a la Google Docs) would as well. Making bulleted lists drop dead simple to create (and well formatted by default) would go a long way. Despite the steady stream of small updates, Apple hasn't fixed important, longstanding bugs with their software (e.g., inaccurate table of contents ordering relative to actual document content, styles not always applied when you select them), and they have not fixed significant usability issues (lack of the ability to update a document's style based on some other style, lack of any coherent bullet feature that relates to a style, lack of rich conditional formatting options in Numbers, very limited shortcuts for styles) in the ~15 years I've been using iWork. ![]() However, my observation is that the products have stagnated. I do follow along with these updates as a regular Pages and Numbers user. Thank you for the pointers, and I agree the products haven't been completely abandoned.
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